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How many times have you felt an awesome idea and wanted to validate it with a peer group ? How many times have you felt that you are found sitting at a great idea for so long that you find that competition has been capitalising on that ? And how many times have you reached out to your community to build something together ? The answer to all this #Ideacamp .

Events like #barcamp , #ignite have ventured partly in this direction but with Ideacamp we just want to celebrate ideas (any domain) and understand how collective brainstorming can take things to the next level. This platform will seek to validate ideas as well as gather support in building a team around the idea. The key component of Ideacamp would be the audience. The more diverse they are the greater will be the input to the event per se.. Already we have members from ISOC Chennai trying to connect the event with global thinkers. Due to be held in the third week of May 2010 Follow developments on twitter and facebook by tracking the tags #ideacamp

Search meets Social and Social meets search. A few weeks back twitter announced with twitter predictor it was able to predict box office success.Lately a lot of commercial organisations are listening to social media streams like twitter , facebook, linkedin to understand their customers, service levels as well as online branding. Naturally its imperative that we combine both streams without diluting content in each of these domains. Searchcamp has been renamed as India Search Summit Owing to the tremendous success of the previous two editions of Searchcamp , we wanted it to grow into a larger and serious initiative that can bring together more Search professionals so that we can take it to other cities in India on the long run.

The Knowledge Foundation has already done events in the past like Buzz140 ( #buzz140 ) on twitter (2009) , India’s first Facebook Garage in Proto.in Pune edition (2009) , its time that we elevate the bar to combine all into one focussed event on Social Media. This time we want to combine popular tools like LinkedIn also to the discussion . India Search Summit and Socialmaxx will be held on consecutive days at the third week of August 2010. We welcome volunteers and enthusiasts who can join us to help in these initiatives . To follow development updates on this event pls search for #socialmaxx

The last three days of IGF at Hyderabad we have been talking about innumerable topics related to internet and its various topics , privileges, advances so on. But for the first time there was this interesting session presented by DEF (Digital Empowerment Foundation) India on a topic to ensure tha we bring the neglected masses of the underprivileged rural poor who don’t have access to internet. The objective of the workshop was to discuss on the initiative we need to undertake to bring low cost , sustainable access to the rural poor so that we can empower the next billion into the ubiquitous information superhighway , the internet. The last 5 year has seen many ambitious projects, plans initiatives like OLPC, 100$ Laptop, rural kiosks, echoupal, Project Disha so on trying to create a better value proposition which can benefit the rural poor. All these initiatives created with a prime object for the underprivileged to take advantage of the benefits of internet. But each of these attempts seem to have some short coming or other and don’t seem to hit the nail on the head clearly. Thus the search is still on for a Utopian solution to the a low cost sustainable access. We are looking for a solution at the Base of the Pyramid where the market opportunity is amazingly vast. But at the same time the challenge and supporting infrastructure is pretty bare bone and hostile. The users at this segment are clearly a VFM ( Value for Money) market ie…value conscious .

The session was presided by : Mr Chandrasekhar, Special Secy, Dept of IT, Govt of India and moderated by Osama Manzar, Founder , Digital Empowerment Foundation of India and Manthan Award

The major Pain Points with conditions in developing countries like India is :

There is a severe shortage of power in rural india. And most of the time there is lack of adequate voltage

Lack of computers and basic cost of computers is at higher threshold making it less affordable for rural users

Lack of connectivity in the last mile, internet access in rural areas

Lack of knowledge / awareness among the rural poor on the benefits of internet

Uncertainity of technology adoption by end users in rural india

Given this established premise of thought it was subdivided into 4 Thematic groups

Each of the thematic groups was allowed to brainstorm for 15 minutes on the issue with donning the thinking hat and to evolve at points of influence and its recommendations. The evolved observations and recco were summarized into clear set of points that was bullet ted and put forth to the entire audience. All Recommendations were consolidated as a report to be sent to the IGF Secretariat and the Ministry of IT, Government of India

Recommendations of Session on Access , Connectivity and Devices

We should focus toward providing low cost devices to rural poor with cheaper access cost. What we should focus towards will be something like mobile device that can be multifunctional in communication as well as for internet access at the same time can be charge and used for longer period of time thus derive better utility value to the users. Unless our solutions provide a dramatic level of Price – Performance it will not be a value buy to the user.And we identified the need for a hybrid solution that is able to integrate and address all the pain points of the system.

We should look towards increasing the investment Capacity of end users or shared access should be made available

Increase human resource capability in using the devices and connectivity. Rural Empowerment on using of these devices and internet need to be focused

Technology seems to be having smaller phase out periods. We are currently using Core 2 machines and we have nearly 7 upgrades in PC based technology in as much as 4 years

We need to create awareness on visible Improvement in the quality of life of end users due to connectivity

Recommendations Content and Services

Standardize content to meet regional languages like standardization of keyboards of all vendors

All citizen services to be made available in the mobile platform too

Suggestion to insist on Uniformity in formats across different states in the same areas

Translated content to be made available in regional languages too

Prioritize and support use of Open source Software

Services and content has to be made available and accessible to physically challenged (disabled) people too

The session ended with deeper appreciation to the group dynamics that was clearly visible as outcome of such brainstorming session. All thanks to Osama Manzar for gathering such an elite participant list who also doubled as panelist to contribute in evolving the thought process. The entire gathering was more than 35 people strong and here is a snap shot of some of the participants who doubled as panelists

On 3rd of November at 3:11 pm wherever you are at chennai all you need to do is click that moment either with your mobile cam of camera and upload the pic to our Flickr pool with a short description of where you were at that time slice with your name.

This is a small experiment to take a time slice out of the life of a chennaiite and try to potray the same online. For more details on this project pls visit our site http://www.311pm.com/